She caught up to him in the yard, loading seed bags onto the flatbed with brisk, efficient movements, as if yesterday’s glancing combustion in the tractor cab had never happened.
But Rachel knew better. The air felt sharp-edged. Jack’s posture was off this morning, his face turned deliberately away from the house, jaw grinding like he had a mouth full of gravel. She watched from the entryway, coffee clutched between both hands for warmth and steadiness, until he noticed her. He paused mid-step, balancing the seed bag on his shoulder, and gave a nod. Something had settled in him. Or broken open, maybe.
He didn’t come in for breakfast like he often did. She ate alone at the kitchen counter while the radio said something about the chance of frost. Afterward, she retied her ponytail, slid her arms into her farm jacket, and crossed the yard.
Jack was at the workbench in the big shed, wrench in one hand, cleaning gunk from a seeder component. His hair was damp at the nape with his exertion.
“Morning,” she said, probing.
Jack hesitated, then offered a shy, lopsided smile. “Morning.”
They acted normal. She thought they did, anyway: she checked his work, gave short instructions, asked about the tractor’s engine. But each time she said his name, each time they brushed arms, the memory of yesterday flared. He moved more carefully around her now, always at the edge of her, never quite looking too long. There was something sweet in the way he fumbled to regain last week’s casual rhythm.
She spent the day in a state of unquiet, trying to convince herself it hadn’t changed everything. But it had. She went about her errands, held meetings on the grain price over the phone, signed for a delivery, all the while replaying over and over the sound of his voice when he came, the way his hands shook, the final spasms of his body.
That night, she smoked a cigarette, even though she’d quit for nearly a year now, trying to work up the courage to call Jack. Instead, she poured herself a whiskey and after she finished, she decided to drive over to the bunkhouse where Jack was staying.
She saw his light was on. As she approached the house, something made her hesitate at the window. Through the gap in the curtains, she glimpsed Jack sitting on the edge of his bed, head tilted back, throat exposed, one hand working rhythmically beneath the waistband of his boxers. His chest rose and fell with each ragged breath, muscles tensed beneath taut skin, his other hand gripping the bedsheet so hard his knuckles had gone white.
He pushed his boxers down with trembling fingers, revealing his full length, flushed and straining against his stomach, his cockhead glistening with precum in the dim light, his whole body taut with need as he wrapped his hand around the base with a barely stifled groan.
She should have left. But Rachel only watched him, standing still as a fence post, watching him through the window.
Jack’s head snapped forward, mouth parted in a soft, involuntary grunt. She stared at his hand, stroking along the shaft, the way his thumb brushed over the head and left a smear of slickness behind. There was no pretense. If anything, what struck her most was the honesty of it: the way his need was all muscle and hunger and youth.